In Victor’s newest editorial, he reverts back to the relationship between Dalí and Lorca. We presented the letters between Dalí and Lorca, if you missed them, feel free to recap Part One and Part Two. However, verses illustrating the bond between the artists, Victor expounds the influence that Dalí had on Lorca’s work.

Want to read and discover more on Lorca, his life and his works? Then go and take a gander at Victor's blog.

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He was homosexual, as everybody knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice, but I was repulsed because I am not a homosexual and could not yield to him, and besides, it hurt. Of course, I was flattered vis-à-vis prestige. He was a great poet, and so I felt I owed it to him to offer him a piece of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.

This is a highly sensationalistic and deeply self-contradictory quote, but given Salvador Dalí’s penchant for telling outrageous stories of questionable veracity, why is it biographers take him at his word on this particular tale?

Corroboration.

Federico Garcia Lorca never publicly indicated anything about his relationship with Dalí besides that he was a dear friend. However, their letters to one another have been published, and besides recurring sexual innuendo in the text and the effusively romantic valentine exchanged, there are details scattered throughout that form a key by which we can “recognize” Dalí when he’s being referred to in Lorca’s works. And sure enough, there are several pieces Lorca wrote during his American trip that shed some light on their relationship and his feelings about Dalí in the aftermath of its dissolution.

I’ll be upfront and admit there’s not a single English word that really lives up to the double-entendre at play in the poem “Nocturno del hueco”. Some translators emphasize the emotional or spiritual level and go with “Nocturne of Emptiness” or “Nocturne of the Void,” but I think they miss the erotic undercurrent of the piece to which brave souls nod when they render it “Nocturne of the Hole.”

Nocturne of the Hole

I

To see there’s nothing left,
to see the holes and the clothes,
give me your moon glove,
your other glove lost in the grass,
my love!

The air can tear the dead snails
from the lungs of the elephant
and can blow on the worms frozen stiff
by the buds of light or the apples.

The emotionless faces sail
beneath the small outcry of the grass
and in the corner is the frog’s little breast,
with clouded heart and mandolin.

In the huge deserted plaza
the recently cut cow’s head moos
and the forms that seek the snake’s coil
are hard, definitive crystal.

To see there’s nothing left
give me your mute hole, my love!
Academic nostalgia and sad heaven.
To see there’s nothing left!

Inside of you, my love, through your flesh,
what silence of derailed trains!
how many florid mummy’s arms!
what a dead-end heaven, love, what heaven!

It is the stone in the water and it is the voice in the breeze
limits of love that escape from your bleeding torso.
To touch the pulse of our present love
is enough to make flowers burst out over the other children.

To see that there’s nothing left.
To see the hollows of clouds and rivers.
Give me your hands of laurel, love.
To see there’s nothing left!

The pure holes spin, for me, for you, in the dawn
saving the footprints of blood’s branches
and some tranquil plaster profile that draws
instantaneous pain from the punctured moon.

See the concrete forms that seek your void.
Mistaken dogs and bitten apples.
Look at the anxiety, the anguish of a sad fossil world
that doesn’t find the accent of your first sob.

When I search the bed for the rumors of thread
you have come, my love, to cover my roof.
The ant’s hole can fill the air,
but you go moaning, directionless, through my eyes.

No, not through my eyes, because now you show me
four rivers fitted to your arm,
in the rough shack where the imprisoned moon
eats a sailor in front of the children.

To see that there’s nothing left
Impenetrable love, run-off love!
No, don’t give me your hole,
mine’s already in the air!
Poor you, poor me, poor breeze!
To see that there’s nothing left.

II

I myself.
With the whitest emptiness of a horse,
ashen mane. Pure, doubled plaza.

I myself.
My hole penetrated by broken armpits.
Dry skin of a neutered grape and asbestos of dawn.
All the light of the world fits inside an eye.
The cock sings and his song lasts longer than his wings.

I myself.
With the whitest emptiness of a horse.
Surrounded by spectators who have ants in their words.

In the cold circus of the mutilated profile.
Through the broken columns of cheeks drained of blood.

I myself.
My emptiness without you, city, without your consuming dead.
Equestrian through my definitively anchored life.

I myself.
There is no new age nor enlightenment.
Only a blue horse and a dawn.

The imagery of this poem is borrowed very heavily from their letters and also from the painting “Little Ashes,” which Dalí did for Lorca, but I only have space to point out a few. Dalí’s vision of St. Sebastian [ shown above ] is marked, besides with the usual torso shot through with arrows, by one broken hand and one amputated hand, and so this poem begins “Give me your moon glove / your other glove lost in the grass / my love!” Later on we meet up with the beloved’s “bleeding torso.” The “emotionless faces” of Dalí’s anti-romanticism are paired up with the “clouded heart and mandolin” associated with the putrefactos. This dichotomy is further echoed in the phrase “academic nostalgia,” which reminds of the place they met.

But this kind of dissection is missing the deep, haunting ache of the piece, as well as its tenderness and humor. I urge anybody interested to follow the link and read the full piece as it speaks for itself much better than I could hope to do. I would give a small hint to a higher level of the piece, however, and note that Dalí often signed his letters to Lorca, “Your Buddha,” and one of the chief tenets of Buddhism is the “Emptiness of Self,” the idea that there is no solid core or soul, but only limitless personas that arise due to causes and conditions. Dalí’s mask-wearing is explored along these lines in Lorca’s “impossible play” The Public.

One of Lorca’s most passionately erotic pieces yet discovered was written around the same time, although it is not strictly a part of PINY. “Amantes asesinados por una perdiz” (“Lovers Assassinated by a Partridge”) doesn’t closely indicate Dalí, although the opening insistence, “They both wanted it” does pointedly contradict Dalí’s supposed “repulsion,” which he was already spreading in letters to friends. What I find most significant is that this is the first time we see Lorca leveling all forms of love as equally valid:

They were a man and a woman, or that is to say, a man and a bit of earth, an elephant and a boy, a boy and a bulrush. They were two dismayed young men and a chrome-plated leg. They were boatsmen! Yes. They were were Guadiana boatsmen whose oars surrounded all the roses of the world.

They were, simply, lovers, and none of the details matter at all.

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Read the complete collection of Victor's Editorial Series:

Introduction

Anda Jaleo

The Censorship of Lorca

Childhood Memories

Lorca AKA Capdepón

How to Get a Law Degree Without Trying

Rehearsing Death

The Gypsy Ballads

Poet in New York, Part 1

King of Harlem

Double-Vision in Vermont

The Seemingly Tragic Tale of Little Stanton and Mary Hogan

The Divine Dalí’s Hole

Wall Street Comes Tumbling Down

Ode to Walt Whitman

Lorca Sings for Salty Seamen

Cry to Rome

Theatrical Revolution

Lorca Gone Wilde!

Robert and Were Really in Love!

Will the Real Putrefacto Please Stand Up?

The Puppet Tugs Its Pull

La Barraca

Three Breakthrough Plays of Feminine Oppression

Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and Sonnets of Dark Love

Death of a Poet

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